Oslo -- What Might Have Been

Oslo -- What Might Have Been

I saw the new play “Oslo” the other night at Lincoln Center here in New York City. It was very good (and it’s sold out for the rest of its run, though it’s scheduled to re-open in a few months at a larger venue). The writing, acting and direction are brilliant. It’s the backstory of the negotiations over the Oslo Accords, which led to the famous White House Rose Garden ceremony in September 1993. President Bill Clinton had Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat sit down at a table together, shake hands, and sign an agreement that contained a roadmap for settling issues between the two sides and would hopefully lead to some peace in the region.

Gary Hershorn / Reuters

I thought at the time that the negotiations must have been led by the U.S., but this play describes the actual and fascinating lead-up to that day. Two Norwegian diplomats (husband and wife) got the ball rolling between the two sides in secret and laborious, often contentious negotiations in Oslo that lasted a couple of years. Even if the Clinton administration was late to the table, I remember how excited and hopeful I was that day in 1993, thinking that maybe another breakthrough of the magnitude of Jimmy Carter’s Begin-Sadat Camp David Accords in the ‘70s was going to happen.

Alas, it was not to be. Fanatical right-wing extremists in Israel agitated others, or were agitated themselves, to oppose the agreement and denounce Rabin as a traitor. The opposition included calls for violence, and Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by one of those fanatical extremists, an Israeli settler. The accord went by the wayside.

Last fall, in an op-ed piece in The Forward, Hillary Clinton took note of the recent “20th anniversary of the assassination of then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, a good friend, a courageous warrior and a great statesman.” She went on to write that the somber anniversary is a good time to strengthen the relationship between the U.S. and Israel. The piece is entitled “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel ― and Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Benjamin Netanyahu was in the opposition to Rabin’s Labor Party government at that time. He was so prominent among those making the incendiary speeches to the fanatics who were calling for retaliation against Rabin, stirring them up and agitating them further, that after Rabin was assassinated, his widow said Netanyahu had her husband’s blood on his hands. I’ve long thought that he should have been arrested then, charged with treason, and put in jail for the rest of his rotten life.

For Secretary Clinton to have commemorated Rabin on the anniversary of his assassination and in the next sentence reaffirm an “unbreakable bond” with Netanyahu was, to put it mildly, insensitive and knuckle-headed in the extreme. In March of this year, at the AIPAC conference in Washington, she doubled down on that unqualified, unquestioning support of Netanyahu’s non-peace-seeking regime.

If we’re all very fortunate, we won’t have to hear anything ever again from Donald Trump after November, at least as far as government and politics are concerned. But that doesn’t mean, as I see it, that there won’t be anything left to worry about, certainly as far as U.S. foreign policy is concerned.

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